About Kosmograd Newsfeed

This is the latest version of the Kosmograd Newsfeed, which has been published since 2005 by Martin Gittins.

The main focus of the blog is architecture and the city, viewed through the lens of Soviet Constructivism, and encompassing themes such as branding and city self-image, Suprematism, disurbanism, space travel, edgelands, borders, landscapes, drosscapes, virtual realities, representations.

It never fails to amaze the phenomenal growth of the city in Victorian times, in the 18th Century a map of London was drawn to try and impress that London was as big as Paris, but by the middle of the 19th Century thhere was no contest. How quickly the collection of villages in north London, the sleepy hamlets of Tottenham, Highgate, Friern Barnet, Colney Hatch became swallowed by a sprawling monster.

There's a great book to accompany the exhibition in case you can't make it to British Library, a dog's breakfast of a building compared to the breathtaking beauty of the neighbouring,St. Pancras, of which more another day.

From the British Library website you can also download overlays of some of the maps as layers for Google Earth. But it would be great if there was some kind of time dimension capability to Google Earth, so that you could zoom backwards and forth in time as well as space. This is something that Dan Hill at the wonderful City of Sound has been banging on for a while, with particular reference to Barcelona.